If your browser understands Silverlight 4, you will see something like this:

Windows in 21 Days

Indeed it required a bit more time to write this library. Though floating windows are common in graphics applications, there are not too many such controls in Silverlight. One of the best is Tim Heuer's FloatableWindow control.

Starting this project, I just wanted to add a few functions to the existing control. But it turned out it was easier to rewrite it completely. Finally, only a few original methods had left after my rework. I added the following functionality:

Window can be resized by dragging any edge or a corner

Added possibility to snap in moving or resizing window to the nearest window's boundary

Window can be minimized, maximized and restore its position and size

Window can be opened in modal mode

Window can save and restore its size and position

Added an icon bar, displaying minimized or all windows

The icon bar can display a snapshot of a minimized window or an icon - a FrameworkElement attached to the window.

What's Inside

It would take too much time to explain how it works in details. I am sure, you (like me) don't like reading long boring documents. After all, you have my source code. I'd better describe how it can be used. But before we start, I'll introduce some terms and properties used in the library. The picture below will help me to illustrate them.

Where the most important elements are:

FloatingWindow - Base class of the resizable windows

FloatingWindowHost - Canvas element containing floating windows

Iconbar - Panel containing icons of the minimized windows

Bootstrap Button - Button opening the Iconbar

Classes and their Members

This section contains a list of the most useful class members.

FloatingWindow Class

DialogResult - A value that indicates whether the FloatingWindow was accepted or canceled

FlowDirection - The direction that title text flows within window's icon

Icon - Content displayed as an icon of the window on the iconbar. If not specified - a snapshot of the window will be displayed as an icon

IconText - Text displayed on the icon of the minimized window

Position - Current window position

ResizeEnabled - A value indicating whether resizing is enabled

ResizingAreaThickness - The width of the resizing area

ShowInIconbar - A value indicating whether to show minimized window in the iconbar

ShowCloseButton - A value indicating whether to show Close button

ShowMaximizeButton - A value indicating whether to show Maximize button

ShowMinimizeButton - A value indicating whether to show Minimize button

Title - Content displayed on the top of the window. Can contain any UI elements

TitleBackground - The title background

Close - Closes a window

RestoreSizeAndPosition - Restores window size and position stored in the IsolatedStorage at the close of the window

RestoreWindow - Restores window state, size and its position if it was minimized or maximized

Show - Shows a window

ShowModal - Shows a window in modal mode

Activated - Window is activated and got focus

Closed - Window is closed

Closing - Window is closing

Deactivated - Window is deactivated

Maximized - Window is maximized

Minimized - Window is minimized

Restored - Window is restored

FloatingWindowHost Class

IconWidth - The width of the window's icon

IconHeight - The height of the window's icon

OverlayBrush - The overlay color

SnapinEnabled - A value indicating whether snap in is enabled

SnapinDistance - Distance between two windows' boundaries when moving window is "attracting" to another one

SnapinMargin - A gap between two adjacent windows

ShowMinimizedOnlyInIconbar - A value indicating whether to show only minimized windows in the iconbar

WindowIconWidth - The width of the iconbar item

WindowIconHeight - The height of the iconbar item

CloseAllWindows - Closes all floating windows

HideIconbar - Hides the iconbar

ShowIconbar - Shows the iconbar

Other properties can be found in the code.

Getting Started

The windows are "floating" in the FloatingWindowHost - a Canvas control, which shall be created first, for example, in the markup:

Created window is hidden. The FloatingWindow class has three overloaded methods Show(). The first overload takes no parameters and displays the window in the center of the hosting container. The second and third overloads show the window in the specified coordinates.

There is another option: to restore window size and position saved when the window was closed. Don't worry about saving these parameters. They will be automatically stored in the IsolatedStorage at the close of the window if you specify a unique window's Tag. You can set it during runtime or in the XAML:

Now you can call the RestoreSizeAndPosition() method to show the window in the previously saved coordinates:

detailsForm.RestoreSizeAndPosition();
detailsForm.Show();

In version 1.2, new ShowModal() method was added to display a floating window in modal mode. It blocks access to underlying windows displaying an overlay above them. The color of the overlay is defined by the OverlayBrush property.

Like the ChildWindow it has a DialogResult property, which can be retrieved on windows closing:

The major distinction between the modal window and the ChildWindow is that the last one blocks access to the whole area occupied by the Silverlight application, while the floating window in modal mode - only parent FloatingWindowHost.

If you need to know which window becomes active (gets focus), you can subscribe to the Activated or Deactivated events added in the version 1.2.1 (see the MainPage.xaml.cs):

Now windows are displayed and we can switch between them, move and resize. Selected window becomes topmost and gets focus. If we want a window to be displayed always above others, we can set its TopMost property to true.

Appearance of the window is defined in the generic.xaml file.

Honey, I Shrunk the Windows

When we move or resize a window, it sticks to the nearest boundaries. Maximal distance at which the window attracts to other windows is 5 pixels and is defined in the SnapinDistance property. If you don't like the windows sticking close to each other, you can specify non-zero SnapinMargin - a gap between adjacent windows. "Mind The Gap" as they say in London.

We can enable or disable resizing setting ResizeEnabled property. Besides, it is possible to disable resizing by one of the coordinates. For example, if we set window's MinWidth equals to its MaxWidth, the window can't be resized by the X coordinate.

Writing code for resizing, I created two interesting (at least for me) by-products: ResizeController and SnapinController. They are more or less independent from other parts of the code and I am going to use them in my other controls.

Dude, Where is my Window?

If we provide a possibility to minimize windows, we shall give quick access to them. And not only to minimized ones because some windows can be moved out of the visible area of the windows container. That's why I recommend to set ShowMinimizedOnlyInIconbar property to false.

The icon bar emerges each time when we press the bootstrap button at the bottom of the windows container and hides when we click on an icon. It contains windows' thumbnails ordered by the IconText. If you don't want to display a window's icon on the icon bar, set its property ShowInIconbar to false.

Window's thumbnail is displayed as a snapshot of the window if the Icon property is not set. Otherwise, the FrameworkElement set by the property will be displayed. For example, look at the markup of the WindowWithChart.xaml:

<my:FloatingWindow.Icon><my1:MyIcon/></my:FloatingWindow.Icon>

It defines the MyIconUserControl as an icon of the window. Nice looking, isn't it? If you want to use an image as an icon, you shall specify its dimensions:

How to Add It to your Project

Here you have a short step-by-step instruction:

Find the FloatingWindowTemplate.zip in the downloaded archive and copy the ZIP file to the ItemTemplates folder of your Visual Studio. On my machine, it is the "C:\Users\Eugene\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#" folder.

Add the SilverFlow.Controls.dll as a reference to your Silverlight project.

Copy the resource dictionary generic.xaml from the SilverFlow.Controls project to your Silverlight project and add it to your application resources.

Add the FloatingWindowHost control to your page, hosting the "floating" windows. See the MainPage.xaml how to do that.

Add a code, creating and displaying the "floating" windows.

Afterword

First, I would like to thank you all for your contribution, ideas, notes and critique. I do not promise to answer all your letters or implement all your proposals. After all, you are free to use and modify this code.

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About the Author

Jevgenij lives in Riga, Latvia. He started his programmer's career in 1983 developing software for radio equipment CAD systems. Created computer graphics for TV. Developed Internet credit card processing systems for banks.
Now he is System Analyst in Accenture.

Comments and Discussions

Hi there, I found this extremely interesting and visited your site last week and downloaded the project and have played around a bit with it. It has real potential.

However, my SSD went dead yesterday and today when I checked out the project from TFS I noticed that I was missing the DLL which I compiled from your code, and low and behold, the heliocode site is gone. Is this some temporary issue or is it in fact gone forever?